What Are Friends For
by moonswirl
Summary: <html><head></head>Gleekathon, day 1813a. The morning after discovering what Rachel and Sophie have been up to, it's not Sophie but Chloe's friend Tara who comes to talk to her. - Red series - 5TH ANNIVERSARY CYCLE, day 7a of 21.</html>


_Started my daily ficlets to make the hiatus pass, then decided to keep going with a 2nd cycle, and then a 3rd, 4th, etc through 86th cycle. Now cycle 87!_

**_IT'S THE FIFTH ANNIVERSARY CYCLE OF_**_** GLEEKATHON!** - Five years! Five years! *insert flailing* Okay, not quite, but by the end of this cycle, it will have been five years of daily stories (sometimes twice a day! ... and for seven very frightening days a couple years back, three times a day!). It will also be the end of this crazy ride. I started thinking about ending gleekathon months ago, and I wanted to finish my ongoing series before that happened. It made it so I could finish out this fifth year, and it couldn't be any better that this cycle is actually ending on October 22nd 2014, which was the day it began, in 2009... Now here we go!_

**This story is a 'Character Swap' for _After the Storm_, a Red series story originally posted on November 5th 2013.**

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><p><strong>"What Friends Are For"<br>((Older) Rachel), Chloe (OC), Sophie (OC), Tara (OC)  
>Red series<strong>

**Character swap:**** Tara Wickham for Sophie Perry**

She was going to stay up in her room until they'd both left. That was the plan. She could wait that long, if she didn't think about the bathroom, or how hungry she was getting… She would stay lying on her bed, staring at the ceiling, trying to listen to the sounds of the city outside the window more than the footsteps near or far from her door. She knew when Rachel left, but Sophie was still roaming about, and she'd been hearing her approach the door, wait, then leave again, a few times in the last hour. Maybe she was trying to get up the courage to knock, but Chloe didn't care. She didn't want to talk to her right now, not after what she'd learned, about what they'd both been up to, Sophie and her mother.

There were footsteps on the stairs again, and Chloe thought at first that it was Sophie, making another round, but then the more she listened, the steps didn't sound the same. They were slower, almost… explorative. Then, another new something: a knock at the door. She waited. It could still have been her.

"Chloe?" That was not Sophie, but it was someone else she knew, and that she would be here… She got up from the bed and moved to crack open the door.

"Tara?" she blinked, finding her tall Canadian friend, from the Berry workshop. She didn't even know about her staying with Rachel, or she wasn't supposed to, but she was here. "What are you doing here? How… how are you here?" she asked, remembering herself and pulling the other girl into the room before shutting and locking the door again.

"I got a call," Tara told her, "From Rachel Berry's daughter," she pointed over her shoulder. "When were you going to tell us you're living here?" she added, still baffled.

"I didn't want you guys to think I was getting any kind of special treatment," Chloe admitted, moving back to sit on her bed. Part of her expected for Tara to just leave now that she'd found out the truth, but instead she came and sat, too. "So… What did Sophie tell you?"

"All she said was that you were thinking about leaving and going back home to Indiana, and she thought you could use someone to talk to that wasn't her, because you were angry at her." Chloe had to appreciate here the fact that Sophie hadn't actually told Tara the thing that had been upsetting her, especially seeing as this was the reason she was upset in the first place. But she had reached out to get her someone to talk to other than her, someone live and in person, unlike her parents who were out of state, and she couldn't pass that up.

So she told Tara the whole story. She told her about running away to New York the first time around, seeking out her father with nothing more to go on than a half blurred picture in a newspaper. She told her about meeting Rachel Berry for the first time, and about how she'd eventually decided to go home. She told her about seeing her again, while performing with her Glee Club, and the whole run up of her being taken on with the workshop, and the deal her mother and Rachel had struck together, to have Chloe stay at Rachel's house so her mother would know she was both safe and somewhere that she couldn't just run off afterward and never return.

Then she explained about telling Sophie the story of her birth father, trying to find him, which led to Sophie going behind her back and showing the picture to her mother. And here things had taken a turn, with how Rachel had recognized the man in the photo, who had been a co-worker years ago. She had found him, after an extended search, and had even gotten him to come and see her, at the workshop, which would have been great, except that her father had left before the workshop had ended, and Chloe had never known he was there. That was until the night before, when a drunken Sophie had spilled the beans, and now… and now…

"Wow…" was the first thing Tara could say, and realizing it wasn't saying all that much, she considered it again. "Are you okay?"

"I don't know…" Chloe admitted. "I don't know I am, I don't know… how to be. All I've wanted, since I found that picture, was to see my father, the one who'd left. I wanted to know what he was like, I wanted to know… why he would leave me and my mother like that. I wanted to know if he was the reason I loved music, and performing, the way that I do. If I could just figure that out, then maybe it would tell me more, about who I am, who I'm supposed to be. It sounds dumb when I say it like that…" she shook her head, her curls falling in her face.

"No, it doesn't," Tara promised her. "I get it. But it sounds to me like they got it, too. Miss Berry and her daughter? They were just trying to help, and maybe not get your hopes up, which sounds like it was probably a good idea, with…" She stopped short, looking back to Chloe, who'd lifted her head to look at her. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to…"

"No, you're right," Chloe sighed. "My father didn't want to see me, so why should I spare his feelings."

"Maybe… maybe he was just shy. I'd be scared if I had to face my kid after leaving them all those years. But look, either way… Don't leave because of him. You belong here, with us," Tara smiled, nudging her knee to the younger girl's. "I get that they did things behind your back, but… if your dad had shown up that day and come to you instead of running off, would you still have been angry at the two of them?" Chloe bowed her head. No, of course she wouldn't have been angry at them; she would have jumped into their arms and thanked them. "So what's it going to be?" Tara asked, and Chloe breathed out, thinking.

"I'm not going back home, not yet," she promised. That much, if she really thought about it, she guessed she'd always known. "I just need time before I can really… be there, with them," she nodded to the door.

"Get dressed," Tara decided, standing up. "I'll call the others, tell them to meet us at the diner. I'm starving, let's get breakfast." Chloe was not about to argue to that, not when her stomach was just shy of roaring for hunger. She went with Tara, wondering how long it would be before she could get herself to go and thank Sophie for her getting Tara to come when she needed her.

THE END

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><p><strong>AN: This is a one-shot ficlet, which means that signing up for story alert will not bring you any alerts.  
><strong>**In the event of a sequel, the story will be separate from this one. And as chapter stories go, they are  
><strong>**always clearly indicated as such [ex: "Days 204-210" in the summary] Thank you!**


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